FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT SUICIDE NOTE - PAGE 4

A death earlier this month made to look like a suicide was a homicide, Palm Beach County Sheriff's detectives said Wednesday after they filed charges against the victim's former boyfriend. Sadrac Nelson, 31, of Boca Raton, was charged with first-degree murder. Marie K. Viard, formerly Marie Fleurizard, 38, of West Palm Beach, was found stabbed to death in her bedroom the night of Oct. 2, Sheriff's Office spokesman Paul Miller said. Investigators found a bloody switchblade knife next to her body and a bloody knife in the kitchen.

Lauderhill police have ruled a fatal double shooting a murder-suicide. The dead man and woman, discovered in a single-family home Wednesday, have been identified as Paul Freeman, 52, of Lauderdale Lakes, and Tonia Patterson, 34, of Lauderhill, Capt. Rick Rocco said. "He killed her and then he killed himself," Rocco said. "It was a domestic fight that went really, really bad. " The couple was found around 6 p.m. in a room at a boarding house in the 3300 block of Northwest 17th Street, police said.

It was 4 a.m. Jan. 8 when Robert H. McIntosh and his wife brought their groggy 8-year-old son Jeffrey to their garage. The family climbed into a car and waited as a hose pumped carbon monoxide from the exhaust through a cracked window. As the odorless gas began to turn the interior of the car blue, Jeffrey awoke and cried out. "For all his eight years, he knew what was going on," Robert H. McIntosh, 72, wrote in a five-page suicide letter that his wife Marcia Ann had typed. "He begged us to stop, and we did. It was the most awful day of our lives."

Eleven years after a Coral Springs couple died of simultaneous cocaine overdoses, the mysterious case is again under scrutiny. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement is interviewing witnesses and reviewing city police files in the May 3, 1988, deaths of Richard Weed, 39, and Jane Gosnell, 36. It is the third time the FDLE has examined the case. A fourth outside review was done by a private investigator hired by the couple's friend Barbara Gordon. "There's nothing here that indicates anything more than an accidental death," FDLE special agent supervisor Jim Born told city commissioners on Tuesday, adding that FDLE's investigation is almost complete.

A couple were found dead in their Leisureville home on Saturday, the apparent result of what police believe was a murder-suicide. The bodies of Edward P. Carellas, 79, and his wife, Helen G. Carellas, 71, were found Saturday afternoon when their landlord stopped by their home at 1304 SW 18th St. to retrieve some belongings, police said. Preliminary evidence indicates Edward Carellas shot his wife in their bedroom before turning the gun on himself, Lt. Wendy Danysh said Sunday. A suicide note, thought to have been written by Edward Carellas, does not reveal a motive and was not addressed to anyone in particular.

A Muskogee, Okla., woman who was shot in the head and dumped in a ditch was one of three people murdered by a man who killed himself in Miami last month, law officers said. The body of Glenyetta Moore, 38, was found Friday. Authorities think her killer was Albert Wagner, 36, who also is suspected of killing his mother and another woman. Wagner shot himself as police closed in on him after a nationwide manhunt. The hunt began in Muskogee in November after Wagner's mother was strangled in her home.

Marcia McIntosh was fond of telling her only son, Jeffrey, 8, "Just think, all of this is going to be yours one day," as they walked on the office complex she owned with her husband, Robert, friends say. Her vision, however, was shattered on Monday morning. Police said Robert McIntosh, 72, shot his wife and son with a .22-caliber pistol and then, depressed about a foreclosure on the family business and his battle with alcoholism, killed himself. A pool maintenance worker found a five-page, typed suicide note taped to a screen door leading to the pool of their $358,627 West Palm Beach home with the instructions: "There has been an accident, call 911," police spokeswoman Dena Peterson said.

As a whole, British mysteries leave me cold. I generally find them too wordy and too cumbersome to hold my interest. But Birth Marks breaks the mold. This is an enjoyable, well-written tale that is long on characterization, action and plot. Sarah Dunant has learned well from her U.S. counterparts -- Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton and their followers -- and has created Hannah Wolfe in the same vein as American fictional detectives V.I. Warshawski and Kinsey Millhone. At the same time, Dunant manages to keep the lyrical sensibility that makes British literature so great but seems sadly lacking in their mysteries.

Andrew Hanzel had plans for Oct. 27. He even had the date circled on his calendar. So when Georgia Bresnahan, his ex-girlfriend, drove to his home in Leisureville near Pompano Beach that morning, Hanzel was ready for her, his pistol at hand, his suicide note written, Broward Sheriff's Office detectives said on Monday. She had come to retrieve some pots and pans she left in Hanzel's kitchen when they stopped living together in July. As Bresnahan, 73, bent to retrieve them from the cabinet, Hanzel pressed the barrel of his .38-caliber pistol into her back and pulled the trigger.

A Pompano Beach man who slipped a suicide note into his attorney's briefcase and disappeared from the Broward courthouse Friday while awaiting a jury verdict was treated Saturday for "apparent self-inflicted injuries," police said. Barry Alyn, 64, was found about 10:30 a.m. in a parking lot less than six blocks from the courthouse. He was later arrested and taken to the Broward County Jail. Alyn, who formerly worked as a substitute teacher at Winston Park Elementary and Lyons Creek Middle schools, was on trial for molesting a 12-year-old boy. Shortly after Alyn disappeared, he called his attorney to say he had slit his wrist.